Why Are Grooby Sites So Expensive? Do I Get All The Sites When I Join One?
Originally at groobysauce.com
We believe in being as transparent as possible with our supporters and all of our sites have feedback modules, as well email links to contact us and let us know what’s up. I believe we’re one of the only companies which runs 100% it’s own customer service, and supporters get direct access to the webmasters, management team and company founder/owner.
This post is an effort to save me the time of replying with the same answers and facts to a couple of questions that come up time again, and to try to explain (and offer that transparency) to some of our overall business model and ethics.
The statements, “Your sites costs too much!” and “Why don’t I get the other sites for free?” come up regularly and I’ll try and address them here.
Your sites costs too much!
There is a big difference between something costing too much, and not being able to afford it – and I do empathise if the sites are out of your budget. We do offer different pricing (right down to $10 for tendollartgirls.com) and we do show a fair amount of free content on groobyforums.com or tgirls.com but nevertheless I do recognise that the price of our sites ($30-$40) is more than many corporate cis-sites.
We’re working in a small niche. As much as it’s grown over the years, and the presence of trans people in the media both mainstream and adult is at an all-time high, the potential membership that we can get is miniscule compared to sites like Brazzers, Blacked, Tushy, etc.
I often use this analogy to try and explain :
I’m a fan of craft beer and small breweries. It’s what suits my palate and what I enjoy drinking. I’ve friends who are happy with Budweiser – and as they’re buying one of the biggest selling beers in the world. Budweiser is mass produced and an easy to drink for those that like it. They’re able to buy a case of beer for the same price as I’d pay for 6 of the beers I drink. An IPA from a craft brewery has a much, much smaller potential market and it’s product costs more to produce. For that reason, they’ve got to charge a premium and those who enjoy their beer, and want to keep them in business producing more beer than they are going to love, understand that it’s simply going to cost more than the generic beer which appeals to more.
[you can change beer – for coffee, cigars, shoes, eating out, etc]
Our sites are the same. Our costs are high (model fees/producers are the same as cis-companies). Aswe have less volume our banking costs, our hosting (server) costs, etc are higher. If we offered the sites for less then we do now, we’d have difficulty making the budget to shoot the amount of content we do each month, and the beer company can’t produce my IPA if it lowered it’s prices.
Just to illustrate where the money goes. On a $35 sale between 8-20% goes straight to the billing companies. (for this purpose lets do an average 12%).
$35 paid – 12% billing = $31.80.
If it’s an affiliate sale (partner who promotes our site) we have to pay them 50%
$31.80 divided by 50% = $15.90
So from that $15.90 to $31.80 that you pay, we need to cover everything else. With shoots costing between $1200-2500, hosting (servers), editors, staff, etc. it’s a fine balance to make the sites and the companies work. Yes, we are a profitable company but our margins are a lot slimmer than most companies. If you want proof on how difficult it is to be profitable in the trans website business, one only has to look at the lack of websites out there.
So when we charge $35-$37.99, it’s not too expensive. That’s the price we need to be charging to enable us to produce this amount of content and run the websites, ensuring models, producers, production staff, editors, webmasters, bookkeepers, content managers and designers getting paid. Your payment goes into our whole eco-system.
Do I get all your websites when I join one site?
No.
It’s just impossible to do that and your expectation of that is mainly based on a small mis-direction. Since adult sites started on AVS systems like AdultCheck (Google it for some internet porn history) companies have promoted and advertised that your one membership gets you access to XX other sites. While not un-true, it doesn’t mean you’re getting better value for money. We even do it on our Grooby.Club site. For the same price as you can get GroobyGirls.com, if you join Grooby.club you can get 13 sites! Which is the better deal? It would seem obviously the Club – but it’s not.
Both sites update 5x a week. GroobyGirls (because of it’s age) has more content and updates with 5 exclusive (never seen before) scenes including a new hardcore weekly. Grooby.Club updates with 4 exclusive scenes from any of the current websites, and two older hardcore scenes taken from the other sites. But it very much depends on what you like, and where your discerning tastes are. If you like BBW models, or Russian, or Canadian models then Grooby.Club will provide you what you are looking for.
If we were to put all the sites into one package of unlimited access, it would be priced at around $200 a month or more, just for us to make it work. We do actually offer a Grooby VIP package at $1200 for the year, paid in advance in one sum.
We’ve tried to cater each site to specific tastes. While there is cross-over and many members migrate between sites, for those into very specific likes, like 100% hardcore, or only girl on girl, or early transitioning models then we’ve got sites that are aimed at you, which means 100% of your payment goes to the upkeep of that site. Those with wide tastes, can access larger sites like BlackTgirls, GroobyGirls or Tgirls.xxx and get a bit of everything.
I do recognise that some people may prefer a mixture of everything, but we’ve found that business model just doesn’t work well and to exceed our supporters expectations, we’re better giving them exactly what they’re wanting.
I hope this has explained how we operate a little better, and just why we’ve priced the sites as they are and each site runs as an individual entity.
Thank you for your support.
